Stray Dogs at Theatre503

The way things are going it will not be too long before I can get an AI to write this for me using a few prompt words because there is a predictable regularity about my visits to Theatre503.

The story always begins with the only issue with going to a new play at Theatre503 is finding a suitable date with available seats. In this case it was a Thursday evening and the seat was A3 and as I am Over 60 it only cost £6. A bargain is one thing but this was ridiculously cheap.

My original plan was to walk all the way there but I got a bit tied up around Barnes Common (a Pokemon Go thing) and I shortened the walk by taking a train from Barnes to Clapham Junction. 

My previous visit to The Latchmere, the pub below the theatre, had not gone that well so this time I went for a bar snack and that worked very well. The vegetarian chilli was delicious and the portion size was just right too.

Then it was up to the theatre.

I liked the set immediately, mainly due to its simplicity. Small theatres cannot do elaborate sets but they also know that they do not need to and this stage was several things over the evening including a shanty town and a wood. Imagination is brilliant.

Stray Dogs was a dark historical fantasy story about a city with rich merchants inside the wall, poor peasants outside and a dangerous wood beyond that.

The story was rich like a good historical fantasy should be and I will not attempt to summarise it because that would over simplify it. Besides, the story was not really the point, the interplay between the characters was. These were played by Graham Butler,  Abbey Gillett, Ruxandra Porojnicu, Graeme McKnight and Coral Wylie, all of whom were excellent. Abbey Gillett has been nominated for an Offie for Lead Performance in a Play and while I am happy with that hers was not the only performance that really impressed me.

I loved the feel of the play, not surprisingly as I have always loved books like Gormenghast and Stardust, and I was totally engrossed in the story.

This is the bit where I say that Theatre503 keeps on putting on plays this good and that is why I keep going there. Until next time.

Accidental Death of an Anarchist at Lyric Hammersmith

Lyric Hammersmith is one of the several theatres that I keep a particularly close eye on but, even so, I was not especially tempted by Accidental Death of an Anarchist until the reviews came in.

By then many other people had decided to see it too and I was forced into the Upper Circle, for the first time, and I paid £23 for seat A16.

On my previous visit to Hammersmith I found what I hoped was, finally, a reliable pre-theatre eating place, La Petite Bretagne. and I was pleased to find it did the job very well even if I overindulged slightly with both a savoury and a sweet crepe. The place was pleasingly busy and next time I'll book a table to be sure of getting in.

Across the square at Lyric, I had just enough time to grab a pint of something brown to quell an annoying cough before climbing all the way up to the Upper Circle, you have to go up stairs just to get to the Stalls. I was a little bit vertiginous up there but no more than expected and the view was excellent.

I knew that Accidental Death of an Anarchist was a farce but other than being very silly I did not know what that meant, The farces I am more familiar with have lots of bedroom doors, semi dressed people in the wrong places and mistaken identities but this was none of that, it was an absurd situation created by and centred on an absurd character. Possibly something like The Mask, but it is a long time since I last saw that film so that may be a false memory leading to a false comparison.

The absurd character in the centre is a self-confessed former mental patient who through chance learns of an investigation of a police incident and through by taking an unexpected opportunity and making a quick change impersonates the person leading it.

In conducting the investigation he makes the various policemen say silly and contradictory things as they explain how the anarchist's fall from a window was suicide rather than police murder.

That description does not do the play justice as that simple scenario was horrendously funny thanks to the original story, Tom Basden’s updated adaptation and the mesmerising performance by Daniel Rigby. It was simply one of the funniest plays I have ever seen.

But there was a very serious side to it too as the play was about one death in police custody and made references to the many other cases in this country. We were left in little doubt that the farcical policemen did indeed kill the anarchist, and it took a maniac to reveal it.

Bt wrapping a serious message in a farcical story Accidental Death of an Anarchist made excellent theatre.

A long local loop

For various reasons, mostly some sort of virus, I had not been for a long walk, i.e. over 25k steps, for over two weeks (the monthly walk to West Hampstead) so, feeling a bit better, I wanted to get out walking again. My plan was to walk for three hours and maybe stretch it out to four, in the end it was five.

I set out with only a vague plan, as I tend to do, and in this case it was to pay a visit to some Pokemon Go gyms in Hampton where I do not yet have gold badges. I continued to let Pokemon Go and my mood continue to lead the way after that and as the walk went on and I felt no ill effects I got more ambitions heading first to Hounslow, then Isleworth and then back home.

 

It was a nice walk with a selection of parks and rivers along the way, as well as some mixed suburban architecture. The ground was solid, apart for a short foray through the river in Ham where it has claimed the towpath, and I managed to average a respectable 5km per hour including a stop for coffee and cake in the one decent cafe in Whitton that I know which accepts card payment.

I walked for five hours and covered 25km. That was further and longer than I expect so I was happy with that. I was also happy to catch up with five hours of listening to podcasts but there are still more than one hundred to go.

I hope this means that I am back in the groove, mentally and physically now, and that I'll be doing more long walks in the coming weeks.

Akhnaten at ENO (2023)

I have often been remiss in keeping this blog up to date so I am not certain how many times I have seen Akhnaten but I have certainly seen every production at ENO. 

My online calendar is more help and that tells me that I have seen this production at ENO three times, on screen at Barbican once and online from the MET in New York once, and that my Akhnaten journey started in Ghent in 2015.

As always for Akhnaten I booked a seat in the front row of Dress Circle (A51) which cost me a perfectly reasonable £110. I booked it in July 2022 as soon as booking opened.

 

I try to find a regular place to eat for all of my regular theatres and for Coliseum, and other Central London venues, it is Govinda’s vegetarian restaurant just off Soho Square. There the standard thali is a ridiculously low £6.95 and it is very tasty too.

Having seen this production five times (or more) I knew what to expect, and that is what I got.

Akhnaten keeps coming back and keeps being completely sold out because it is a phenomenal work.

Obviously that starts with the music by Philip Glass and it builds from there. The playing and the singing are excellent and the staging adds so much tension and drama with lots of slow graceful movement and also a prodigious amount to juggling to compliment the Glass motif rhythms.

The only negative was that ENO is under threat due to funding cuts and so this may well be the last time that I get to see this Akhnaten. I hope their fight to stay is successful because while there are other places that do operas in London none of them has ENO's repertoire. Yes, places outside of London should have companies like ENO too but that does not mean that London should lose its.

Charlotte and Theodore at Richmond Theatre

I do not know what has gone wrong, or where, but this was the second time in as many weeks when I suddenly became aware of something on coming to Richmond Theatre soon when I would have booked it ages ago if I had know about it earlier. Kris Marshall was an obvious draw and so was the prospect of a "witty and challenging new play".

Perhaps I missed some emails or perhaps it was a late booking but, whatever the reason, I did not appear to be alone and there was an all seats at £25 offer on when I booked. That meant a slight upgrade from my usual seat to Dress Circle A19.

The play had three themes, the working relationship between married couple Charlotte and Theodore who were academics in the same philosophy department, their philosophical discussions that started with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and led to the conflict between free speech and inclusion, and their family life as parents.

The family bit was minor and irrelevant and seems to have been added just for laughs.

The philosophy theme started a bit heavy, I am not sure how much sense it would make to people with little exposure to philosophy, and got a bit unrealistic with Theodore taking a heated stance against pronouns. The play wanted to use the word "woke", thought better of it and used the synonym "kind" instead.

The changing working relationship between the two was the strongest theme.

The three only slight connected themes made the play a little disjointed at times but there was plenty of good stuff in there to generate an entertaining and stimulating hour and a half. The performances of Kris Marshall and Eve Ponsonby were fine though there was little real drama to give them the space to shine.

While Charlotte and Theodore had its limitations it was a perfectly decent night out and I am glad that I went.

Local parks and gardens

My usual walking companion and I decided to do something local and simple this week and, in doing so, demonstrated yet again just how much open space and natural beauty there is around us.

We met, as usual, at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park because it is about a half hour walk from home for both of us.

From there we took the long way around the edge of the park to Roehampton Gate. There is a shorter route to the gate but that is mostly on grass paths and is actually slower.

After Richmond Park it was bit of a trek along a busy road to Barnes Common and then a left turn between the two railway lines in to Vine Road Recreation Ground where we crossed Beverley Brook for the second time.

The Thames was not far away and we took Barnes Railway Bridge across to Chiswick and then along the river in Dukes Meadow before cutting inland a little for Chiswick House and Gardens where we stopped for coffee and cake.

Cafes are an important feature of my longer walks and this one is one of the best.

We then took a route through the posh houses of Grove Park to rejoin the river at Strand on The Green.

We crossed at Kew Bridge, using a recently opened tunnel to avoid crossing the traffic, and made our way in to Kew Gardens, we are both members so this cost us nothing.

We had done about as much walking as we wanted to do at that point so we went straight down the Broad Walk and visited the shop before leaving via Victoria Gate where we did not have to wait long for a 65 bus.

We covered 18km, a respectable if not particularly long distance, in under four hours, including the break. And in those four hours we spent most of the time in green spaces and/or walking beside the river. I am lucky to live here and I know it.

Hidden Mothers: Folklore in the Postmodern World

Not working in Central London any more (or anywhere else for that matter) I do not go to British Czech and Slovak Association talks as much as I used to but this one was unmissable.

I first discovered Czech artist Tereza Buskova approaching twenty years ago and have had a few memorable encounters along the way so I was very keen to see her being interviewed about her recent work.

These were three similar projects; Clipping the Church, Hidden Mothers and Little Queens. All of these were community projects with local people involved in the design and delivery of the events. They also all had a folklore tradition particularly with regard to the costumes, symbols and foods.

Tereza was interviewed about each of these projects and then we saw videos of them which was a delightful way to fill and hour and a half.

20km Embankment to Gunnesbury

Like all of my best walks this one was a combination of routes brought together serendipitously.

The start was a group walk arranged by South West London Humanists and covered some of the parks in Central London and the ending was a less organised solo walk heading to a friendly Tube station via some Pokemon Go target gyms in Hammersmith and Chiswick.

I do the South West London Humanists walks most months mostly because it is an excuse for a walk but also because the banter is fun. The routes tend to be familiar ones but that is no great problem, they are familiar because they are routes worth taking regularly. 

We met at the Riverside Terrace Cafe in Southbank Centre and then headed out to Victoria Tower Gardens, St James's Park, Green Park and Hyde Park where we stopped for another coffee.

From there it was a short and simple walk to the famous The Churchill Arms in Kensington where I had a quite impressive beed and lunch. They do Thai food and I went for a vegetable Jungle Curry (their hottest) which was a very modest £12.

Meal consumed I said farewell to my fellow humanists and started the solo part of the walk.

The first section, down to the river at Hammersmith, was mostly driven by adding new roads to my Citytstrides map and, as a result, I discovered Brook Green and plenty of nice houses.

From there I was on auto-pilot along the river and through Chiswick before finishing at Gunnesbury station. I stopped for yet another coffee (and cake!) at Jajo as the afternoon was drawing on.

Overall the walk was just over 20km and took me about seven hours, including the extensive stops for coffee and lunch. A day well spent.

Rainbow in Rock at The Cavern

When I saw Memento at The Cavern in February I said that they only band better than that was Rainbow in Rock (same band, different songs) so it is no surprise that I was back at The Cavern a month later to see them.

As always the place was full, there we quite a few familiar faces there, the beer was good and the music was excellent.

To be honest, I would have been happy if Rainbow and Rock had played just Child in Time and Stargazer but they added plenty of that to deliver a rocking two hours of music from the extensive Deep Purple and Rainbow catalogue.

Duet for One at Orange Tree Theatre

Orange Tree Theatre is a modest bus journey away (even when they are on diversion) so I have to have a pretty good reason not to go there and that means I see almost everything. Booking is a routine thing and so I grabbed my seat for Duet for One, A22 in my usual area, for £26.

The diverted bus got me there in good time and I was able to get a beer in the bar beforehand to soothe my worrying cough. I was attracted by the familiar Adnams Ghost Ship brand and it was only after I had paid for it did I realise that it was a low alcohol beer at 0.5%. The beer did its job as a throat lubricant but I felt robbed of the alcohol.

 

The premise of Duet for One is simple enough, a top-flight violinist contracts MS and the impact of this on her leads her to seek the help of a psychiatrist, the play is their conversations over a number of weeks.

That sounds a bit dry and in a way it is, these conversations and measured (one os a professional after all) and cover the fairly predictable areas of the violinist's relationships with her parents and her husband.

There was a lot of depth to some of those conversations, depending on the mood of the violinist at that time, so there was quite a lot of interest but there was also a lack of progression, the play had a beginning but not much in the way of a middle or an ending.

I was also put off somewhat by the obvious comparison to Jacqueline Mary du Pré and Daniel Barenboim. There are significant differences, e.g. du Pré played the cello, but there are too many similarities for this to be a coincidence. I wish that it had been the du Pré story or, if something different then something very different.

From the previous comments you can tell that this was not really my cup of tea but there was plenty going in for me to enjoy and it was a positive experience.

The icing on the cake for me was being able to say a (very) few words afterwards to Robert Lindsay, who had been at the show.

The Journey to Venice at Finborough Theatre

Everything about this play could have been designed to attract me, it is a modern foreign (Norwegian) award-winning play about two old people who love to travel growing old being performed at Finborough Theatre. A bargain at £20.

As always the evening started with a small meal at Cafe du Coin in Earls Court Road where my order of Eggs Florentine and a Magic fruit juice was rewarded with the comment. "your usual", which it was.

Sadly the bar downstairs, The Finborough Arms, remains closed and shows no sign of reopening so I was unable to loiter with a beer beforehand. Instead I went upstairs and claimed a front row seat and sat in my thick winter coat because of the cold.

The premise of the story was that an old couple (older than me!) who used to travel a lot but could no longer do so (health and expense) relived some of their travels at home by watching old home movies, dressing up and describing the scene to each other. It was a sweet story.

Complicating things a bit were some negative memories and the impacts of their old age and poverty. Those memories included hints of affairs and their lack of children. (They did have a lot of cats though and they made a lot of noise off-stage.)

At times the dialogue between the couple got a little probing and testy but it was never argumentative and it was clear why they had stayed married for so long.

Other complications came from the visits of a plumber and a care assistant, the later being relentlessly chatty and bubbly. These intruders helped to put the couple's position in perspective and also gave them a glimpse of what having children might have been like.

I would not call The Journey to Venice an up-beat play but it gave a reasonably reassuring perspective or growing old gracefully and imaginatively despite all the messiness in the past.

Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel at Battersea Arts Centre

For reasons I do not quite understand (fire and covid excepting) I had not been to Battersea Arts Centre for several years and I was very glad to go back.

What pulled me back was Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel or, to be more precise, the reviews I read of it on Twitter. The final straw was a tweet from Dan Rebellato (playwright and Professor of Contemporary Theatre) which I read late at night and booked the show immediately afterwards.

The show has been selling very well and the best seat I could get was at the end of the second row (B1). It was a Pay What You Can event and I went for the recommended £14.

Things had changed a little since my previous visit, in particular the bar has stopped doing food, other than pizza, which was bit of a shame. Still, the beer was very nice.

The show was in the former Council Chamber on the first floor, a delightfully grubby space.

Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel is a difficult show to describe, as the name suggests. The obvious things are that it is a one-person show written and performed by Tim Crouch which mixes observations on theatre with stand-up comedy. But that tells you nothing important.

The show starts with Tim describing a theatre during a performance, commenting on the prices of the seats, the type of people in them and what they are up to before moving on to the play itself, King Lear Act III. The play takes a turn for a weird when Tim points to the fool and explains that he is the actor playing that role. It turns further when he describes the cars parked outside of Gloucester's house.

The story sort of went from there with Tim switching between guide and himself (?) indicated by the wearing and removal of a virtual reality headset. As himself (or the performer of another role) he commented on the state of theatre and threw in a few jokes, ending on quite a good one about a penguin.

Somewhere he asked the question, "Who is saying these words", and while the answer, "I am", was factually correct it was of little help as the "I" was open to many questions.

Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel may sound something like a dog's dinner (poor pun intended) but the elements worked well together and the show both entertained and stimulated in large amounts. I don't know what it was, but I liked it.

From Hammersmith to Limehouse

I have been continuing my regular long walks but have not written about one for a while partially because they have often covered familiar territory and mostly because I have not had the time. Guilt has forced me to finally post one.

The route was mostly my walking partners idea which I added to broadly beforehand and then refined the detail on the day as we went. The plan was to go through Holland Park and Hyde Park and then walk through the centre of London to the Tower. That did not look long enough to me so I added the bit that said carry on walking east until we get tired or bored. And that's what we did.

All the walks requiring us to get to the start by public transport mean joining the 8:57 queue at Richmond Station where all the people with senior citizen Oyster Cards wait for the barriers to open for our free transport when we all rush through to catch the tube that leaves a minute later.

The journey to Hammersmith is a short one and so we were soon walking.

Holland Park and Hyde Park are regular haunts simply because they are parks and they were a peaceful and inspiring start to the adventure.

The very different section through the centre of London started with the police escorting who I took to be Will and Kate out of Hyde Park. It got the tourists excited.

After that it was a case of trying to avoid people as much as possible so, for example, we walked along Jermyn Street rather than Piccadilly. This approach came in to its own in Holborn where, in avoiding Fleet Street, we took many narrow walkways that were new to both of us in an area we both knew reasonable well. 

After that we hit the river and followed it out of London as far as Limehouse Basin where the DLR was waiting to start our journey home again.

The walk was almost 21km and took us just over 4 hours, including a mandatory stop for coffee and cake in Hyde Park. Achieving a rate for 5km/hr was indication of how successful our scheme for avoiding people and main roads was, we can do 6km/hr if uninterrupted but this usually drops to 4km/hr when walking the streets of London.

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow

I get most of my comics news from Twitter these days and it has been obvious for sometime that Tom King is a very popular writer with critical acclaim and two  Eisner Awards for best writer to prove it. That tempted me to try volume 1 of his Batman ran and also Mr Miracle and while I enjoyed both I had plenty of other things to read and I left my exploration of his works.

Then a mate in the pub recommended The Sheriff of Baghdad set during the allied occupation of Iran, which Tom King was a part of. That was excellent. It mixed geopolitics, action and characterisation neatly and, being based on a real-world situation, was unlike most things I read. I was ready to explore more Tom King.

My next adventure was Strange Adventures Volume 5, a title dating back to 1950 and a home for Adam Strange a space adventurer who first appeared in 1958). That shared some of the themes of The Sheriff of Baghdad, this time the sheriff was Mr Terrific who is hyper intelligent and knows everything, and was also excellent.

That led me inexorably to Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow which has also been highly praised.

Yes, it is a Supergirl story but it is not about superheroes and is not set on Earth. It's a Space Fantasy story that happens to have Supergirl in it.

At it's core, the story is about revenge with a young woman Ruthye chasing the killer of her father across galaxies and enlisting Supergirl's help to do so. A lot of the interest in the story comes from Ruthye's character, the interactions between the two women, alien civilisations and the banalities of the chase, such as the sleeping passenger on a spaceship. 

The story is good and well told but what makes the book really really special is the art work by Bilquis Evely.

I had not come across her work before and that is a mistake that I will be trying to make up for. Her style is very suited to Space Fantasy, it is both technical and fantastical and also very detailed, but you can see that.

I could have picked any number of examples that show just how talented she is and in the end I had to settle for the cover above and the single panel below.

 

This is ridiculously good for a single panel and the level of detail and styling reminds me a little of Philippe Druillet, which is most definitely a compliment.

I bought Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow for Tom King and I loved it for Bilquis Evely. When words and pictures combine like this the result is astonishing.

My Brother’s Keeper at Theatre503

Going to Theatre503 regularly is one of my better habits and I was pleased to continue it with My Brother’s Keeper by Mahad Ali. Other people had the same idea and tickets sold so well that I was forced into the unfamiliar territory of the second row where seat B6 was a modest £14 because, apparently, I am over sixty.

The evening started with a stroll down to the theatre from Sloane Square. Along the way I tried to add some new roads to my CityStrides map and I managed to get Cavalry Square despite the protests from the guard on duty at the private road.

Battersea Park was the next destination and I took a winding route through it to include the lake, bandstand, Festival of Britain site, Peace Pagoda and Old English Garden. That is a lot of pretty things to fit into a fairly short distance.

The final stop before the theatre was The Latchmere pub, below the theatre, where I had booked a table for 6:15. Unfortunately their kitchen was in something of a disarray and, after chasing, my food arrived almost an hour later and I had insufficient time to eat it all and no time to appreciate it. Very disappointing.

At lest it took only a couple of minutes to walk upstairs and I was able to get to the theatre on time.

My Brother’s Keeper was, essentially, the stories of two very different families and their interactions; migrant brothers find themselves in a run-down Margate hotel run by a father and son.

The main relationships were within the two families, between the father and elder brother and between the son and younger brother; that gave us four main stories that developed in parallel.

Their stories were set against the backdrop of a neglected seaside town (we have lots of those) and the reaction of some locals to this for whom the arrival of Turner Contemporary did little to improve things.

There is one stand-out line in the play that caused the biggest laugh, it opened with "Rome was not built in a day", and I am still unsure whether it was too funny and so broke the flow of the play or whether it was a sharp statement on the situation. That said, if I had come up with that line I would have left it in whatever it did to the rest of the play.

My Brother’s Keeper is a clever play. It would have been easy to write something about racism and how migrants are actually people too but while the play does go into those territories it is far more about two unusual families trying to cope with the difficult situations that they both find themselves in. Like all relationships these all had their ups and downs. Not all these relationships developed in the way that those involved might have liked but there were good things too and there was a reasonable ending if not quite a happy one.

I like Theatre503 because they do interesting new plays and My Brother’s Keeper was certainly that.